Archive for the 'Newsletter' Category

Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Education

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented or improved many world-changing things—radar, information theory, and synthetic self-replicating molecules, to name a few. Last month the university announced, to mild fanfare, an invention that could be similarly transformative, this time for higher education itself. It’s called MITx. In that small lowercase letter, a great deal is contained.

MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations—more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far.

Meanwhile, the university experimented with using online tools to help improve the learning experience for its own students in Cambridge, Mass. Now MIT has decided to put the two together—free content and sophisticated online pedagogy­—and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they’ve learned the materi­al, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much. More…

Image: James Yang for The Chronicle

Trevor Bailey, Mashable.com

Trevor Bailey is director of worldwide education at Adobe Systems, and leads the programs and strategies that make Adobe products easily available to education institutions.

Today, only 57% of students who attend college in the U.S. actually graduate. The country ranks 12th among 36 developed countries. President Obama’s administration has a stated goal for the U.S.: Take the lead in higher education completion rates by 2020. To accomplish this aim, Obama notes the need to foster critical thinking, champion problem solving and employ innovative knowledge to prepare students for college and careers.

Technical literacy and strong learning engagement are two important paths toward boosting college graduation rates and better preparing students for lifelong career success. However, technology is just one vital factor in a cumulative equation. Educators can benefit by rapidly adopting tablet devices and interactive digital publications.

Better Study Habits and Performance With Tablets

Market intelligence firm IDC projects worldwide shipments of more than 70 million tablets in 2012, up from 17 million in 2010. We are witnessing a major transformation in how digital content is distributed and consumed. According to a 2011 Pearson Foundation survey, 86% of college students who own a tablet say the device helps them study more efficiently, and 76% report that tablets help them perform better in their classes. Seventy percent of college students and college-bound high school seniors are interested in owning a tablet device, and 20% expect to purchase a tablet within the next six months. More…

Image via Mashable.com

By Jennifer Preston, The New York Times

Faced with scandals and complaints involving teachers who misuse social media, school districts across the country are imposing strict new guidelines that ban private conversations between teachers and their students on cellphones and online platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

The policies come as educators deal with a wide range of new problems. Some teachers have set poor examples by posting lurid comments or photographs involving sex or alcohol on social media sites. Some have had inappropriate contact with students that blur the teacher-student boundary. In extreme cases, teachers and coaches have been jailed on sexual abuse and assault charges after having relationships with students that, law enforcement officials say, began with electronic communication.

But the stricter guidelines are meeting resistance from some teachers because of the increasing importance of technology as a teaching tool and of using social media to engage with students. In Missouri, the state teachers union, citing free speech, persuaded a judge that a new law imposing a statewide ban on electronic communication between teachers and students was unconstitutional. Lawmakers revamped the bill this fall, dropping the ban but directing school boards to develop their own social media policies by March 1.

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Image: Stephen Morton for The New York Times

By Daphne Koller, The New York Times

Our education system is in a state of crisis. Among developed countries, the United States is 55th in quality rankings of elementary math and science education, 20th in high school completion rate and 27th in the fraction of college students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering.

As a society, we can and should invest more money in education. But that is only part of the solution. The high costs of high-quality education put it off limits to large parts of the population, both in the United States and abroad, and threaten the school’s place in society as a whole. We need to significantly reduce those costs while at the same time improving quality.

If these goals seem contradictory, let’s consider an example from history. In the 19th century, 60 percent of the American work force was in agriculture, and there were frequent food shortages. Today, agriculture accounts for less than 2 percent of the work force, and there are food surpluses.

The key to this transition was the use of technology—from crop rotation strategies to GPS-guided farm machinery — which greatly increased productivity. By contrast, our approach to education has remained largely unchanged since the Renaissance: From middle school through college, most teaching is done by an instructor lecturing to a room full of students, only some of them paying attention.

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Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC

Today the likes of Google, Microsoft and other leading technology names will lend their support to the case made to the government earlier this year in a report called Next Gen. It argued that the UK could be a global hub for the video games and special effects industries – but only if its education system got its act together.

The statistics on the numbers going to university to study computing make sobering reading. In 2003 around 16,500 students applied to UCAS for places on computer science courses.

By 2007 that had fallen to just 10,600, and although it’s recovered a little to 13,600 last year, that’s at a time in major growth in overall applications, so the percentage of students looking to study the subject has fallen from 5% to 3%. What’s more, computing science’s reputation as a geeky male subject has been reinforced, with the percentage of male applicants rising over the period from 84% to 87%.

But the problem, according to those campaigning for change, begins at school with ICT – a subject seen by its detractors as teaching clerical skills rather than any real understanding of computing.

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